


Drowning in Shadows

by Plooby



Series: Over Hill and Under Hill [6]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-02-02
Packaged: 2018-03-10 06:03:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3279482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plooby/pseuds/Plooby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The very air in Mirkwood seemed to work on Thorin like a poison, weighing his body and clotting his mind. The effect built slowly as they made their way, so that he was not aware of its creep until it was already too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drowning in Shadows

The very air in Mirkwood seemed to work on Thorin like a poison, weighing his body and clotting his mind. The effect built slowly as they made their way, so that he was not aware of its creep until it was already too late. Now, hours or days or weeks deep, he could scarcely line one foot in front of the other, nor keep his thoughts in order. He could not seem to track the angle of his body to the ground, felt as though his feet might be planted on the air and his head aimed at the earth, and could not in one moment remember the last. He sought for air, pulling each breath deep, and found the fog in his mind grew only thicker still with every one.

They had fallen to rest in the shelter of a rocky outcrop (too many rests, too much pause and time spent, he felt it with maddening keenness yet could not quite explain why he did), and he staggered a little ways from the others round the stones, feeling blurrily the need not to be in their view as he struggled for his mind. Their muddled talk barely reached him once he had, in strange echoing murmurs, though they were not far apart. It only surged and ebbed at the edge of his awareness, as Thorin braced his hands on his knees and let his head hang down, hair in a tangled curtain around his eyes.

"Thorin!" came Bilbo's voice then, however, and that he heard plainly: an urgent hiss from off in a direction he could not quite place, whether it was toward the rest or away. It brought his head up and eyes open, the dim shapes and shadows around him swimming in their view. "Come this way, quick! I heard something!"

He groped his hand to his sword-hilt and stumbled forth, the other hand out before him as though to swipe his way through cobwebs. The urgent voice led him out to the clear again, into open wood, and he could not at once see Bilbo's shape amid its dark. But as he blinked and shook his head, it swam out from between the dark hulks of trees, seeming to shimmer and sway in his vision: Bilbo's turned back, as he gazed out and away into the wood.

"What -- " Thorin began, but his tongue felt sticky, and Bilbo had already raised a hand to turn its warning palm back his way.

" _Shh._ Listen. Do you hear that?" His head tilted on a cocked angle. "It sounds like..."

But he never finished, and in the end he needn't have; Thorin had heard, had begun to hear, and at the sound all other thoughts scattered into the mist. In his state he could not at first have said what it sounded like himself, but the sound of it widened his eyes and stopped his breath even before recognition dawned. It was a massive sound, unspeakable in magnitude, the distant thunder of a moving mountain. The steady growing boom of something that filled the world it moved through, and laid it over with shadow from horizon to horizon.

Footsteps. Of a very particular kind.

What strength he still had sagged, and his own feet stumbled backward without his will, until a tree-trunk stopped his back hard enough to jar his teeth together. Bilbo backed away as well - but then stopped, and stood, his head tilting up to stare overhead. When his own looping gaze swung the same way, Thorin saw what, even through the confused syrup of his mind, froze his chest into a solid stone: that he had been mistaken, they all had, and some of those furthest and greatest trunks were not trunks at all. They were legs - legs the size of the vast columns underground they had torn asunder, legs the size of trees with thousands of years' growth. Their movement was slow, almost imperceptible, but he could swear that he saw them moving all the same, driving through the forest on some terrible and monumental purpose.

His head swam, his heart hammered in his chest, his breath heaved through his teeth fast and heavy as a piston - and Bilbo still stood in the open, in easy view, watching as though fixed in place. It took a vast tearing effort of will just to make himself move, but at last Thorin did, crashing forward headlong through the brush to seize Bilbo's arm and drag him back. He hauled the hobbit in face-first against his chest and clamped him there with one arm around his shoulders, his sword brandished uselessly by the other. Waiting moveless through the thunder filling his head.

The world swirled and dissolved in grey on one breath, coalesced again on the next, even as his blood rushed like an angry river through him. He had no idea of whether they'd stood there minutes or one second before Bilbo laughed - that grim, biting chuckle he sometimes found, its air tickling the base of Thorin's throat. It snapped Thorin suddenly aware again, of Bilbo's warm weight against him and breath quick in his ear; it made no sense, though most things made none at present, but the sound of it also unsettled him in some way he could not define. He tipped his head down, frowning, to look at Bilbo, but could see only the curls of his hair.

"What is it?" he muttered, low under his breath. "Be quiet."

"It's just a bit funny," Bilbo said, with a bit less caution, just barely over Thorin's shoulder. His tone was neutral, but there was something underneath it, still - some edge down below. "You, protecting me from a dragon. Isn't it?"

Thorin's head was reeling, his senses tangled, his breath a labour. He tried to blink his eyes clear, to draw his head back enough to see. "What are you saying?"

There was a curve in Bilbo's mouth, he could just glimpse, like a sickled blade. "It's just, when the time comes... well, then, you won't protect me at all, will you?" When Thorin had no answer, he leaned back to where they could look on one another, although still with his hands cupping Thorin's sides inside his cloak (Thorin had no idea when they had come to be there). His smile was patient, expectant, canny. Thorin could scarcely fix it in one place with his view. "You'll throw me to the fire without a second glance, actually. And for what? A bauble to make you look like a king - like a child playing make-believe. One you won't even go and fetch yourself." His shoulders twitched with another humorless chuckle. "So it rings a bit false now. That's all."

Thorin's mouth opened, but there was nothing inside. He groped in the blinded, senseless dark for anything - speech, or thought - and nothing came. He could only stare.

"I suppose I understand," Bilbo said, with a slight shrug, as though he had not seen. "That's why you'd take any chance - like this! - to have me in your arms again, but you'll not go any farther. Oh, you dream of me at night when you take yourself in hand, but you won't actually reach out to take _me_ \- you're afraid. You're afraid I'll know, I'll realise exactly what you're willing to do to me, and hate you for it. Or I'll die when you do. Or both. One way or another, the fact remains, you'll lose out."

His smile broadened... seemed even to grow _too_ broad, as though it were stretching at the limits of his face. There was something wrong about his eyes, Thorin also began to realise, through dreaming, howling numbness; he could scarcely see it in his wavering vision, but the pupils seemed to have grown longer, like a serpent's, and with a shape in each like the hole of a lock, for its key. His head was tilted up very close, his lips hovering so close to Thorin's they shared breath. The tree at Thorin's back blocking all possible retreat.

"In the end, you see, you're a coward," Bilbo said, so near his mouth. "A greedy, selfish coward. Afraid of the dragon; afraid you'll be nothing if you give up what's lost; afraid of your own hollow, rotten oak of a heart." His smile seemed to grow wider still, until there were strange unknown bones seeming to press out of its skin, deforming his features into some flatter, toothier shape, and Thorin turned his head and squeezed his eyes shut and fought to breathe, thinking: _I am going mad, I am going mad like my father's father before me, and I will never return to myself again -_ "And what though you drape yourself in every jewel of every mountain? It might make you king to some... but as much as you long to, you'll never feel it so."

"Why..." It was shaped on his lips, but died in his chest; he had to close his eyes and struggle to fill his lungs again before he could make it complete. His voice, when he could finally force it out, sounded thin and high and windy, wavering as a querulous old man's. "Why would you say this? Why would you speak to me this way?"

"Because it's the truth." Bilbo's voice sounded nonchalant, conversational, amused, but all at once Thorin could not bring himself to look upon his face and see the truth or lie of it. "I can see it in you. We all can - it's just that your company won't say it to your face, for love of you."

His weight and warmth drew back then, all at once. And when Thorin finally dared raise his eyes, he saw Bilbo standing away from him, out of arm's reach. Contempt, sharp as stone, writ deep in each curled corner of his mouth.

"But I have no love of you, Thorin Oakenshield," Bilbo said, and smiled without his eyes. "Why would I do?"

The ground was swaying underneath him; the dark was pressing in, and threatening to devour. He leaned on the tree, tried to steady himself, to find something to hold on to -

And Bilbo's voice pierced through to him again - this time sharp and concerned.

"Thorin - Thorin!" It sounded as though from a suddenly greater distance, and Thorin swung his head around bleary and alarmed to find its source. Somehow, he saw frowning with vision nearly doubled, Bilbo had come to be over on the right side of him, stumbling toward him over underbrush and looking out-of-breath and affrighted, almost as bleary and unsteady as Thorin felt, and far more like himself than before. That last alone was a great enough relief to loosen his knees, but he swung his head back, frowning in bafflement, to where Bilbo had been only a second ago, right ahead of him. There was nothing there now - and no dragon out in the wood, either, he saw. The vast ancient trees in the distance had only been trees, after all. "What are you doing? Come back! We're going to get separated!"

"I'm sorry," Thorin mumbled, his voice so blurred he could scarcely understand himself. All of his weight was slumping back against the tree now, the darkness surging up to take him and he with no will to fight it. "I'm sorry."

"Well, there's - no need for that, just come on." Bilbo was beside him in a few more seconds, puffing, and after a moment to collect himself pushed up to Thorin's side, under his arm, to help him stand. His weight was warm against Thorin, his breath quick, and the words _You'd take any chance_ skirled through Thorin's head and churned in his innards. "We've been looking everywhere for you. Why did you run off like that?"

"I'm sorry," Thorin forced again through what felt like a mouthful of mud, down to the ground. His head hung limply as he let Bilbo drag him forward in plodding steps; drowning in shadows, barely hearing or seeing anything at all. He stumbled on a root, and thought distantly for a second his weight would bear them both to the ground; but Bilbo had always been stronger than he looked, stronger than one would think for his size, and steadied him somehow. "Forgive me. It's all true, what you said. Every word."

"I haven't said anything to you," said Bilbo, a touch crossly this time, though perhaps to cover the slight shake in his voice. "Come along, Thorin. You're not well."

And no, he was not, Thorin was able to think through his fumbling, as he tried to find his feet enough to bear his own weight along. That much, if nothing else, was most assuredly so.


End file.
